Chairperson Berry and distinguished members of the Commission, good morning and thank you for providing this forum for discussion of police practices, particularly the conduct of the police toward the citizens they serve.

Since 1985, I have served as president of the Police Foundation, an independent, nonprofit institution dedicated to supporting innovation and improvement in policing. Founded in 1970, the foundation established and refined the capacity to define, design, conduct, and evaluate controlled experiments testing ways to improve the delivery of police services. Motivating all of the foundation’s efforts is the goal of efficient, humane policing that operates within the framework of democratic principles and the highest ideals of the nation.

The Police Foundation has played a leading role in encouraging training and diversity in police agencies. It has been an innovator in fostering higher education for police and in paving the way for the participation of minorities and women in policing. The foundation has done much of the research that led to a questioning of the traditional model of professional law enforcement and toward a new view of policing–one emphasizing a community orientation–that is widely embraced today. Foundation research is cited at length in this Commission’s 1981 report, Who is Guarding the Guardians?

My remarks today will focus on a basic principle of democratic policing: accountability of the police.

The police department is the place where the criminal justice system and the community converge. The police initiate the law enforcement process in nearly all instances. They must make the critical decision of whether to start the process–usually by making an arrest. Their actions often determine the effectiveness of the process and, to a considerable extent, its fairness.

A fundamental police role is to enforce and uphold the rule of law, and to do so equitably without regard to race, ethnicity, or social or economic status. Sadly, for much of the Nation’s history, the legal order has not only countenanced but sustained slavery, segregation, and discrimination. And the fact that the police were bound to uphold that order set a pattern for police behavior and attitudes toward minority communities that has persisted until the present day. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, America continues to struggle with "the problem of the color line, " as described by W.E.B. DuBois over one hundred years ago.

In no arena is this continued discrimination more apparent than in America’s "war on drugs." Police chiefs have enough problems dealing with misconduct and abuse of authority by some officers without the added burden of having to enforce laws that are themselves mechanisms for discrimination, in the tradition of the Jim Crow era in American history. Obligating the police to enforce unjust laws, most often in inner-city and minority communities, perpetuates the legacy of fear and mistrust, and further erodes relations between the police and the community.

Not only is current drug policy targeting minority citizens in numbers disproportionate to their numbers in the general population and the drug-using population, but these policies are driving differential enforcement policies in many communities. Police are making more arrests than ever for non-violent drug offenses. Although they constitute only 13 percent of the drug-using population, African Americans are arrested at a rate five times greater than white Americans. Simply put, drug arrests are easier to make in inner-city neighborhoods where drug markets operate more openly than in middle-class areas.

Racial inequality remains, as Alexis de Tocqueville observed in 1835, "the most formidable evil threatening the future of the United States." In the criminal justice area, this inequality is manifest in the need to balance two fundamental and competing interests: the protection of Constitutional rights and the protection of law-abiding citizens from crime. At the point in which they converge, equality under the law becomes more a matter of form than substance for minorities and the poor, who are the subject of aggressive police tactics rarely if ever used in middle- and upper-class neighborhoods against the majority class in our society.

Allegations of racial profiling and pretextual traffic enforcement by police against minority citizens have exacerbated fear and mistrust of police in many communities. The employment of zero-tolerance and order-maintenance strategies by police in many cities has resulted in disproportionate targeting of minority citizens for arrest and, in some cases, for abuse at the hands of the police. The result of these practices and strategies is an increasing racial divide that threatens the very foundation of America’s criminal justice system. When certain communities view the criminal justice system as unjust, they are less likely to be cooperative, and more likely to withhold information, to fail to appear as witnesses, and to withhold guilty verdicts in important cases. Moreover, the moral authority of the legal order becomes meaningless and an important deterrent to criminality is lost.

For the police to be effective, they must have the trust and cooperation of the citizens they serve. Often the communities most in need of effective policing because of high crime rates are the very communities most distrustful of the police. Progressive police executives have come to understand that, in order to generate community support, the police must think and act like they are a part of the community they serve. Police must engage the community as partners and be responsive to community concerns.

A recent Police Foundation survey found that over 95 percent of rank-and-file police officers believe that the most effective way to control crime is by working with citizens and communities. What has come to be known as "community policing" is predicated upon community partnerships to combat crime and improve the quality of life in neighborhoods. Discriminatory laws that force discriminatory enforcement seriously undermine the ability of police to engage minority communities as partners. Without community involvement and support, vital information essential for crime control does not flow to the police, and both the community and police effectiveness suffer as a consequence.

While both internal and external accountability of the police are required, internal accountability is more effective at deterring police misconduct.

A 1977 foundation study found that "the lack of systematic, centralized data collection in many departments inhibits the rational development of new policies, training programs, and enforcement procedures. A reliable, national-level source of information about police-civilian shooting incidents is necessary so that states, cities, and police departments can review and objectively evaluate their laws, policies, and procedures affecting police use of deadly force." Likewise, a 1998 report by Human Rights Watch cited the lack of meaningful information about trends in abuse and departments' mechanisms to respond to such incidents. "Where data do exist, there is little evidence that police administrators, or prosecutors, utilize it to try to deter abuse. Also consistently lacking, is a system of oversight in which supervisors hold their charges accountable for mistreatment, and are themselves reviewed and evaluated for their effectiveness in managing problem officers. The Human Rights Watch report further cites patterns of behavior by some officers whose histories of abuse and complaints have, for the most part, gone unchecked because of the code of silence and flawed systems of reporting, oversight, and accountability. Other studies also suggest that a small number of officers tend to be responsible for a high proportion of shootings, lawsuits, and complaints of brutality.

Virtually every police department has policies prescribing officer conduct and regulating use of force. No police department or police chief should knowingly condone conduct that runs counter to either department policy or Constitutional standards. While there is accountability for acts of corruption and other forms of wrongdoing in most police departments, there is little or no accountability for those who allow such an environment that tolerates corruption. How, for example, were a few officers able to brutalize Abner Louima within the walls of New York’s 70th Precinct, within sound if not sight of first-line supervisors and other precinct commanders?

Where police misconduct occurs, it is likely the result of two fundamental failures of police management: (1) a failure to clearly and strongly articulate policies, and to hold all personnel–regardless of rank–accountable for adherence to those policies; and (2) an inability to effectively track indicators of performance that contradict official policy and the rule of law. Values in police agencies come not just from documents that describe them but from traditional police culture. Too often, there is a disconnect between policies and practices, a failure of management to monitor behavior and to intervene before a crisis occurs. To assist departments in addressing these problems, the foundation has developed two technologies that integrate police accountability, quality of service delivery, and community satisfaction with police services.

Every year, incidents of police abuse of authority cost local communities tens of millions of dollars in legal damages. Tax dollars are wasted. Careers are destroyed. The public trust is compromised. A widespread absence of any systemic approach for assessing risks that place municipal interests at risk can be faulted for the inability of officials to cope with this problem. To respond to this challenge, the Police Foundation has spent years developing The RAMS© (The Risk Analysis Management System) that centralizes key performance data, identifies critical risk areas, and allows for early intervention and strategic response to reduce the potential for liability, to assist officers, and to promote community confidence.

The foundation has also developed a Quality of Service Utility (QSI) for the collection, analysis, and comparison of a range of performance-related data associated with traffic stops, enabling administrators to quantify performance over a specific date range, and creating a base for comparisons among officers, between commanders, and for the entire department against department established standards.

In his thoughtful essay, Policing For People, Stephen Mastrofski observes:

‘Law and order’ and ‘crime control’ have been at the top of the police reform mandate for the last thirty years, but during that time very few police chiefs have lost their jobs because crime rose. Chiefs are far more likely to lose their jobs, and police agencies more likely to damage their reputations, when they fail to police for people [emphasis added].

It’s true that you cannot change what is in people’s hearts, that all people have certain prejudices. But you can hold people accountable for how their prejudices influence their behavior and their work. Police administrators ought to have "zero tolerance" for attitudes and behavior that are unprofessional, unlawful, and unconstitutional. It is the lack of internal, systemic controls, and not "a few rotten apples," that perpetuates problems of misconduct and abuse by police. In reality, the majority of police officers are honest, dedicated, hard-working public servants. It is they, as Judge Milton Mollen observed, who are "the biggest victims of the crooked cop."

Because of the nature of their responsibilities, the police have the power to intervene and become involved at very basic levels within the lives of American citizens. The nature of the police response–the manner in which officers interact with citizens and the methods by which they enforce the law–have critical implications for our democracy and the quality of life of our citizens. As Jerome Skolnick writes, "Order achieved through democratic policing is concerned not only with the ends of crime control, but also with the means used to achieve those ends."

Police administrators should proactively institute and enforce strong policies governing conduct, as well as systems to collect and analyze data relative to police-citizen contacts such as complaints, use of force incidents, and traffic stops. Such efforts would inform policy, guide recruitment and training, and build accountability necessary to restore and maintain public trust in the police.

Thank you and I would be pleased to respond to any questions.